The Wright House
Standing like a loving mother, beckoning for her children to come in before dark, the Wright House looks out over 35 acres along State Road 24 in Rosewood, Florida. There is nothing left of the town of Rosewood — even its mailing address has been replaced by Cedar Key. Most people in the area would rather forget that Rosewood ever existed and, until a curious reporter came knocking at the door of the Wright House in 1982, the world knew little about it. During one horrific week in 1923, this home and its owners, harbored men, women, and children seeking refuge from the violence outside.
Named for the plentiful pink cedars that grew there, Rosewood, Florida was a thriving town in the 1800’s. Residents worked at making turpentine and turning trees into lumber and pencils. Life was good for everyone, both black and white, until the cedar trees were overharvested, and the mills were shut down. John and Mary Wright stayed in Rosewood to run their general store, but most other whites moved on to the newer company town of Sumner located just one mile away. The majority of blacks in Rosewood stayed behind to work their land and raise their families. Many also worked as domestic help for the white people who had moved to Sumner.
The Wright’s home was a three-story Victorian located at the edge of the woods on the outskirts of town. Railroad tracks ran past Rosewood just a short distance through the woods from the Wright house. Although the Wrights had tried to have a family of their own, none of the three children lived to the age of five. It may have brought comfort to the Wrights when area children came to their yard to sample the grapes that grew from vines along the property. Other whites often criticized John Wright for being too soft on blacks. Wright’s affection for the people of Rosewood and his heroic acts during the first week of January 1923 would less than a decade later, lead to him being shunned and very much alone.
The early 1900’s saw a spike in racism across the whole United States. What became known as the Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots from South Carolina, to Washington D.C., to Chicago, Illinois. Anger over blacks filling in for white workers while thousands of soldiers had left to fight in World War I attributed to much of it. Returning soldiers wanted their jobs back and the resentment toward blacks did not end with job competition. Many whites across the southern United States worried that white women were in constant danger of being assaulted by black men. Quite often, unproven allegations resulted in blacks being lynched, shot, and burned at the stake. Volatile mob behavior toward black neighborhoods was common. Florida was no exception. On December 31, 1922 the Ku Klux Klan held a parade in Gainesville where they advocated for the protection of white womanhood. The next day on January 1, 1923, and 50 miles away in Sumner, Fannie Taylor, a 22-year old married white woman, ran screaming from her home.
Neighbors who responded to Taylor’s cries for help found her shaken and bruised. Taylor claimed that a black man had forced his way into her home and proceeded to beat her. When Taylor’s concerned husband arrived home a short time later, Fannie added that the stranger had also raped her. Some locals were skeptical of Taylor’s claims as they knew she had a white lover. They believed it was more likely that the couple had argued, that Taylor’s lover had hit her, and that this was Fannie’s way of covering up the affair. Whatever the truth really was, Taylor’s accusations touched off a week of violence, senseless murders, and the total destruction of the nearby, mostly all-black town of Rosewood.
Word of the assault spread quickly, and soon white mobs were headed to Rosewood from as far away as Jacksonville and Georgia. The population of Rosewood at the time was roughly 300 and the mob’s numbers would be more than triple that. Rumors and theories were abundant. Some whites said Taylor’s attacker was an escaped convict from a nearby prison while others believed he was a resident of Rosewood. By that first afternoon, the shootings began.
The first vigilantes to arrive in Rosewood were a small group of white men with hunting dogs in tow. Because the dogs were attracted to a wagon owned by black homeowner Sam Carter and believing Fannie’s attacker had been the escaped convict, the group of men descended upon Carter for questioning. After failing to torture an admission of guilt out of Carter as being an aid to the convict’s escape, the men forced him to dig his own grave and then shot him to death.
By late evening, the number of marauders had grown substantially. Now speculating that Taylor’s attacker had been Rosewood resident, James Carrier, the out-of-control mob began shooting into the Carrier house. Several women and a group of children who had gathered earlier in the Carrier home for safety, fled out the back door and into the woods. As the mob kicked in the front door of the house, James Carrier sat armed and waiting. Carrier shot in the mob’s direction, killing two white men. The mob briefly retreated but returned a short time later to shoot up the Carrier house and burn it down completely. From there the mob marched through the town burning churches and homes along the way. Although the charred remains of a man and woman were later found among the rubble of the Carrier home, the bodies were never officially identified.
Over the course of the next few days, John and Mary Wright took in several of the traumatized Rosewood families, hiding children in the well on their property and more people upstairs in their home. Other families took to the woods, hiding in the swamps for days while enduring the winter cold in only the clothes they had on their backs. Wright, who had friends with the railroad, managed to get out a message that read, “The town is on fire. Send a train.” The train arrived in the night, stopping along the way in the woods, picking up women and children, and taking them to safety. Most escapees made their way to Gainesville and Archer — having lost everything including the land they had once owned.
The number of bodies vary. Documented deaths from that week of terror say that two whites and six blacks died either by gunfire, being drug behind cars, beatings, or lynching. One much-loved woman in town who had been seen running out the back door of her home was shot to death as she ran for cover. Some reports say, that as many as forty people died that week and that many are buried in a mass grave deep within the woods. Most survivors reported that the men and women killed during the attack on Rosewood had nothing to do with the assault on Fannie Taylor. By the end of that week, the only building left standing was the Wright’s home. All of Rosewood had been burned to the ground.
Months later, rumors spread among whites in Sumner that John Wright had been seen in Gainesville, visiting with some of the black families who had escaped. They suspected that Wright was attempting to convince the blacks to return. None ever did. As vacated properties in Rosewood went up for sale, Wright bought many of them. It was assumed that Wright intended to give the properties back to the black families if they ever returned but whether or not that is true is unclear. Because of Wright’s involvement in harboring blacks the week that Rosewood was burned and due to the rumors of his continued association with the survivors, Wright was often threatened and called vile names. Out of fear for his and Mary’s lives, Wright kept a pistol in every room of the house.
Eight years after the attack on Rosewood, Mary Wright passed away. Now completely alone, John Wright developed a drinking problem. He frequented a bar in the nearby fishing town of Cedar Key and when there on one particularly cold winter night, Wright became so drunk that he passed out. Locals threw Wright into the bed of a pickup truck, drove him to his house, and tossed him out into the front yard. The next morning, Wright was still there, dead from exposure. Wright was then quickly and carelessly buried in an unmarked grave at the back of the Shiloh Cemetery in Sumner.
No one really talked about what took place at Rosewood after Wright’s death. Area locals wanted the history swept under the rug and the black families who had fled were afraid to discuss it for fear of retaliation. Records about what happened at the Wright House and about Rosewood itself after Wright died, remained sketchy until well after 1977 when a retired Air Force Major by the name of Doyal Scoggins and his Japanese wife, Fuji purchased the property. The Scoggins were totally unaware that their new home had once harbored people hiding from certain death.
Scoggins loved to hunt, and the Wright House with all its acreage, made the perfect location for targeting deer, hogs, and turkeys. Fuji detested the isolation and begged her husband to return to their former home, but he refused. It wasn’t until a newspaper reporter by the name of Gary Moore with the St. Petersburg Times, (now known as Tampa Bay Times) showed up in Cedar Key looking for a story, that the Scoggins became aware of the history of Rosewood. When Moore’s story hit the stands, an entirely new mob of people descended on Rosewood from all over the country. Ed Bradley of the popular CBS news show, 60 Minutes tracked down the few surviving former residents of Rosewood and brought them back to the site for a retelling of what had taken place there. It was a bittersweet reunion among the then elderly former townspeople of Rosewood. The 60 Minutes episode that followed led to a movie being made about Rosewood starring Jon Voight and Ving Rhames. Even though the film received numerous awards, the movie never made it big at the box office.
Over the years, the Scoggins welcomed educational tours to their home — even offering refreshments and entry inside. The Rosewood Heritage Foundation (RHF) was created to honor those whose lives were lost and forever changed, and to make sure they would not be forgotten. RHF provides bus tours for students of all ages and any other organizations with an interest in the history of Rosewood. Typical educational tours include a stop at the Archer Museum, the Cedar Key Museum, and a scenic drive through Sumner and Rosewood. The drive into Rosewood includes a stop at a historic marker located between the edge of State Road 24 and the property line of the Scoggins’ home. Since its installation and dedication by then Governor Jeb Bush in 2004, the historic marker, which briefly tells the horrific story of Rosewood, has been torn down numerous times by people wanting the past left behind.
On more than one occasion when the RHF tour bus has stopped to let riders read the historic marker, visit the John Wright home, and see the water well, tour groups have been met with hostility. According to historian, Sherry Sherrod DuPree, “For a few years, passengers in trucks, cars, and motorcycles with metal bars and ropes would yell obscenities to terrorize our tour groups.” Because of encounters such as this, the Rosewood Heritage Foundation found the need to alert the Levy County Sherriff’s office ahead of any scheduled tours. An officer then patrols the area prior to the bus arriving and will stop traffic while the tour group emerges from the bus. As recent as 2018, the metal historical marker has needed repair due to gunshot damage.
Ironically, Fuji Scoggins herself has been a victim of racism. As a child her home in Saipan was destroyed by bombs from American planes during World War II. She and her family then slept on the beach until being captured and held in a prison camp surrounded by barbed wire. Later, while living in Rosewood and working tables at a restaurant in Cedar Key, Fuji came face to face with someone who still hated her Asian ethnicity. She noticed that an older man wearing a WWII ball cap kept staring at her and making hissing sounds any time she approached. Suddenly the man said to Fuji, “I hate your people.” Fuji gracefully stepped back, bowed her head, and then raised it and replied, “I’m very sorry that you feel that way. But war is war. It’s not the people.” Fuji relates that she didn’t cry in that moment but that he did.
In 2018, sixteen years after Doyal Scoggins left Fuji for an old girlfriend, Fuji’s children finally convinced her to sell the home. At 86, the house and land had become too much for her to handle on her own. Although the Rosewood Heritage Foundation would love to have purchased the property and turned the Wright House into a museum, the Foundation could never come up with the money. On April 24, 2020 the keys to the Wright House and its history were turned over to new owners. According to Scoggins’ daughter and realtor, Connie Dichtas, “The new owners are expecting their first child and it is their intent to live out their lives in that house. I told them that people will drive up the driveway and ask to see it at times because that’s how it is.” Dichtas worries though that the buyers’ agent, “may have been tainting them about the whole thing.” Only time will tell if the new owners continue to allow the tours to stop by but, if the house has anything to do with that decision, the doors will likely open to those seeking the truth about Rosewood.
